My blog has moved over to my main website, michellerichmond.com. The website has been completely redesigned so that new, featured posts now appear at the top of the page. Additional posts can also be found at the bottom of the page under the headings “News and Notes” and “From the blog.” I also now have a monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for by using the form in the sidebar.
In the two-part essay I Am for Sale an Afghan woman describes the terror that she and her immediate family faced when she refused a marriage arranged by her uncle.
The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is the brainchild of Bay Area novelist Masha Hamilton (The Camel Bookmobile, 31 Hours), who first visited Afghanistan in 2004. Inspired by the courage of the women she met there, she created a place for Afghan women to share their stories, anonymously and uncensored. Read more about it here.
This month’s online issue of the British magazine Easy Living features Culture Editor Beatrice Hodgkin’s round-up of “brilliant summer books.” The list includes The Whole Wide Beauty, by Emily Woof, The Day the Falls Stood Still, by Cathy Marie Buchanan, Tell it to the Bees, by Fiona Shaw, The Vice Society, by James McCreet, Love Verb, by Jeams Green, Ties that Bind, by Catherine Deveney, April and Oliver, by Tess Callahan, and The Year of Fog. Thanks, Ms. Hodgkin!
The Year of Fog, Michelle Richmond (Orion, £6.99) Dive into this novel with trepidation, for its story is deeply harrowing; the protagonist loses the child of her fiancé in the thick fog of a beach in San Francisco and won’t give up the search to find her. A gripping, altogether visceral read.
Holy smokes, The Year of Fog headlines The Daily Mail’s list of sizzling summer reads. I’m in swelteringly good company with Ian McEwan’s Solar, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, and Harlan Coben’s Caught. The British edition just came out last week. (In England, No One You Know came first.) It’s fun to see The Year of Fog having a second life in the English language. (Plus, I love the cool blues and startling red of the English cover.)
Over at Pause, Sally Howell Johnson writes beautifully about her reaction to the boxes of photographs in antique stores, the false sense of beauty or perfection created by digital photography, and a quirky family tradition.
But the one thing I cannot bring myself to look at in these stores are the boxes of old photographs. These images of the people’s lives placed in cardboard boxes for total strangers to rifle through disturbs me. I want to buy them all, take them home, fill albums with them.
I love coming across blog posts in which a reader has quoted a passage from one of my books and put his or her on spin on it, using it as a jumping-off point for personal rumination–as Sally Johnson does here with The Year of Fog. I love these glimpses into other people’s lives, love the sense it conveys of reading as a conversation and as a starting point for deeply personal associations.
As a reader, so much of my own buried past comes to surface unexpectedly when I’m reading a book, and I often find myself pausing and marking the page with my finger while I stare off into space, remembering. What I love about Sally’s post–beyond the interesting leaps of thought and the deftness with which she writes about photography as memory–is that I can imagine her setting my book aside for a moment to take her own mental trip back in time. And this makes me feel less lonely about the business of writing.
I went to San Francisco today for a meeting, and realized while I was sitting there that it was the first time in months that I had sat down one-on-one with another person who was not my husband or son. When my son is away for his very brief stints at pre-k, I don’t feel that I can afford the time to sit down with someone and talk. I’m on deadline–I am, in fact, way behind deadline–and the time, it seems, is not my own. Any spare moment must be spent writing, an activity which I do in complete solitude. Sally’s post reminds me that there is a reason for all that alone time, and that ultimately, when a book is in the world, it is part of a conversation; it may reach into people’s minds and lives in a way that I, as a physical person in the world, can never seem to find the time for.
And now, as I check the clock, I realize I must put aside my computer and go pick my son up. And I know I should not allow myself to feel the tug of wanting to write, because, soon, he’s going to be driving himself here and there, and then, he’ll be off at college. Yesterday afternoon, we we went to see Toy Story 3. During the scene in which the mother is standing in her son’s room just before he leaves for college, and the audience was completely silent, my little boy looked over at me and said loudly, “But mommy, when I go away to college, will you stay with me?” Well, yes, I did start bawling right then and there and cry through the rest of the movie. So I remind myself that picking him up and spending the day with him is a privilege, and this book will get written someday…just not today. And I’ll have a lifetime as a writer, but only a few years as mom of a little boy.
E.B. Davis on “Writers Who Kill” weaves two of his recent reading experiences, along with the story of his first published fiction, into an interesting mini-essay about what it means to be an authentic writer. Congratulations to Davis on the publication, and thanks for the nod!
I’ve written for years. At first, I hesitated to call myself a writer for fear that my story would be false when I never was published, risking my integrity…I started called myself a writer because believing provides a catalyst to the writing process even though it doesn’t increase publishing probability…
Last week I proved my authenticity as a writer in a small way. Voices from the Garage, an ezine published my short story, “Daddy’s Little Girl.” Becoming published was proof of my authenticity. Richmond points out that a mathematical proof is the litmus test of theory. I’m no longer a possible writer, but an authentic one. It may be a small credit, but at least my story is now true. I’m a published short story writer.
You write a book, it goes out into the world. You have no idea whom it will reach, and when, and how they will react to it. You hope it finds its way into the hands of someone who finds it useful–as entertainment, of course, and, occasionally, as something more substantial than that. It is a matter of luck that a book sometimes finds its way to someone who, due to her own personal circumstances, is able to find some kind of comfort or familiarity in it.
So I was humbled and moved to come across a blog post by Shevonne Polastre, who lost her sister to alcohol poisoning in January of this year. She happened to pick up No One You Know based upon the synopsis, and found that the feeling experienced by the book’s narrator mirrored her own.
I am constantly comparing my life before and after Kristine’s death. It’s like an abrupt slice of my life. There is no continuum; just a sudden halt. There is also a heaviness in the air now that I can’t escape. Every day I wake up missing my sister, but also my old life. It’s a life that seems like it’s always out of my grasp.
Like the family in the book, we are having a hard time getting closure due to the mystery still surrounding my sister’s death. How can you move on when no answers have been given to you? The only thing that we have been told is that Kristine died due to alcohol poisoning.
Shevonne has started a non-profit organization, Stop Alcohol Deaths (S.A.D.), in order to raise awareness about the dangers of excessive drinking.
You can follow her tweets here.
Over the years, I’ve heard from a number of readers about their own experiences with grief. For a fiction writer, a story is just a story. While writing a book requires a degree of emotional commitment, there is clearly no comparison between writing about grief and living it. As a novelist, I’m always aware of that distinction, and always hopeful that I can write about the fictional experiences of my characters with some measure of truth. Which is why Shevonne’s post meant so much to me, and why I hope you’ll stop by her website, and, if you’re in the D.C. area, participate in the running event that she is planning in honor of her sister Kristine.
but No One You Know has been in the top 10 bestsellers at Barnes & Noble in Mystery and Crime for a couple of weeks now, right after the Stieg Larsson Millenium Trilogy novels and a couple of titles by James Patterson and Lisa Gardner. Of course, there is a crime in my novel, which, technically, makes it a crime novel. (And I’m a great admirer of some of the classic crime novels–especially the Martin Beck series by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall–not to mention some of the newcomers to the genre, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo among them.) Anyway, the above-mentioned books are all full price, and No One You Know is only $1.99, on account of it having been remaindered. Which, of course, is why it’s selling so well, so late in the game. Even people who usually get their books from the library can get behind a $1.99 hardcover.
There is a silver lining to the business of remaindering, which is that No One You Know, which never quite gained a following the way THE YEAR of FOG
Of course, if you want to pay full price, The Year of Fog and Dream of the Blue Roomare just a couple of aisles away from the remaindered section of the bookstore, under Fiction and Literature. One day I’ll write a long, juicy post about store placement. For example, when Dream of the Blue Room first came out in 2003, you couldn’t find it anywhere, but when it was re-released by Bantam this year, it was all over the summer reading shelves and new fiction shelves–which has less to do with what’s inside a book than with how well your publisher does getting it out into the world. People often ask me what it felt like to switch from a small, independent publisher to a big New York house. “Do you get less attention?” they ask. “Do you fall through the cracks?”
My answer tends to surprise people: my experience has been quite the opposite. When I moved to Bantam, under the auspices of my editor Caitlin Alexander and the amazing marketing folks at Random House, I suddenly felt as though I had a true home for my books, where they were not just published, but also promoted. Because no matter how good a book may be, how many years of your life you may have spent writing it, without a smart marketing strategy, it will quickly disappear. Some small publishers, of course, are brilliant at marketing. But my experience with Bantam has been that there’s no substitute for a team of smart people working on getting your book out into the world, into the hands of readers. Which is where, ultimately, every book wants to be.
This month, Editorial Presenca publishes the Portuguese edition of The Year of Fog, O Ano do Nevoeiro. I haven’t been able to find the translator’s name, but will post it as soon as I know.
Roxanne Ravenel over at All Things Girl conducted a wonderful two-part interview with Joshilyn Jackson, whose new novel, Backseat Saints, will surely satisfy her fans and earn her many new ones. Joshilyn talks about her love-hate relationship with the South (”I am truly happy nowhere else, and yet I am angry with it, so I don’t imagine I am finished writing about it”), what she reads, and why she thinks writing groups are a good idea, among other things.
My favorite bit of the interview involves Joshilyn’s writing process (or lack thereof). This pretty much sums my process up, too, sans ballet (my boy is more into ninjas).
Oh Lord, I wish I had a process. It would be so much more efficient. I write on three different computers and mail the updated files to my g-mail account to download the latest every time I switch. I write at home in bed on my ancient craptoposaurus, at home in my office on my desktop, and I drag my little netbook everywhere to write in coffee shops and carpool lines and while waiting on a folding chair for my youngest to finish her ballet lesson. I do not have set working hours, either. I write in seizures, disappearing to borrowed vacation homes, off season, to draft twenty thousand words in four days, and then I don’t open a single file again for two weeks, then I’ll be up at three am for nine days in a row, revising. It’s a ridiculous, stupid way to work, and I cannot recommend it. It’s also the only way that works for me.
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